


Sleepwalker

by audreycritter



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst to the max, Gen, Near Death Experience, and first person, conversations outside of reality, fear toxin, i will come up with better tags later, not about tim being a villain, third person, tim drake just needs somebody to love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-15 17:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9247913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Tim Drake isn't sure who he is anymore, especially after a nearly fatal dose of fear toxin.What if the worst nightmare isn't something that attacks you, but something that you are?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own DC Comics' characters.

There is cold, wet gravel under Tim Drake’s cheek when he hits the ground and the armor that protects his ribs from the blow reminds him that he is not Tim Drake with a broken gas mask, he is Red Robin.

But the mask is broken and the tendrils of fear toxin curling around his face remind of a time when he was Robin. A time when Scarecrow wasn’t climbing inside his brain, but when he donned a mask and saved the Bat from a similar fate.

That was when he stopped being just Tim Drake.

But he’s not Robin now either.

And Red Robin is about fifteen seconds away from being nothing more than a shrieking sack of bones and guts, based on the level of toxicity he’d measured before his gas mask broke.

So really?

He doesn’t know who the hell he is.

He’s not sure it even matters.

* * *

_I am a ghost._

That is what I tell myself.

I used to be a boy but now I am a ghost and I walk the tombstones of a field of graves. They all have names and they are not my name but they are names that are part of me.

I am a son, a brother, a friend.

I was, before I was a ghost.

I trail my fingers along the granite and along the engraved letters so sharp they cut my fingers, that would bleed if they could, but they don’t.

Jason Todd, Janet Drake, Jack Drake, Stephanie Brown, Conner Kent, Bruce Wayne, Damian Wayne, Richard Grayson.

And more beyond them.

The grass, chilled and dry, rustles in the bitter wind that blows across the field. The field goes on forever in every direction, and maybe somewhere out there beyond the horizon there are blue skies and green prairies, but here it is clouded and pale.

Here, it is death.

I find him at the end of the row of tombs, perched on a grave with my own name on it.

I didn’t even know I was wearing a wool peacoat until I shove my hands in my pockets while facing him.

“Mors vincit omnia,” I say to him.

Death looks a lot like me, actually, or whoever I used to be. His hair is longer, his skin ashen, his own coat wrapped tightly around thin shoulders.

Or maybe he looks exactly like me and I don’t even know how bad I look half the time.

Looked.

“Oh, I’m not Death,” he says, hopping down and mirroring my pose. “Death is real.”

There’s a taste of sage on my tongue.

“Are you not real?” I ask, because this whole place feels like an in-between sort of place, a fiction compared to the things I know and remember.

“We aren’t real,” he corrects, flicking my forehead.

And though it is ridiculous, my heart-- the heart that is the heart of a ghost-- skips a beat.

“What,” I say. It is not a question because I am not certain I want to ask and hear an answer.

“We’re a dream,” he says. “And this is where dreams come to die.”

“No,” I say firmly, because I have lived too much and felt pain too deeply for it to have been a dream. I have done too many things, can recall a thousand vivid details, to have dreamed it all.

The taste of sage grows stronger.

“No?” he echoes. “This isn’t something you can argue. It’s a fact.”

“We’re talking about my life!” I say irritably, my voice raising. I gesture to the line of tombstones behind me. “I didn’t dream all this!”

“Oh,” he says, giving me a pitying look. And then his face twists into something cruel, a malicious press of his lips into a thin line.

“What?” I demand, asking now.

“Tim. Timmy. Timbo,” he says. “I didn’t say you were dreaming. I said you _were_ a dream.”

“That’s insane,” I snap, but inside the sick lurch of realization plants doubt.

“Look,” he says, pointing.

I turn and the sage is so strong in my mouth that it burns my gums.

The tombstones are gone and there is a flat cement patio, a small white table, two painted iron chairs and a flowering plant surrounded by butterflies. In the distance there is an old building and I recognize it; it is Arkham. It is Arkham Asylum on an impossibly sunny day. I even know the plot with the cement and the flowers, except I remember it as overgrown and broken.

Here, it is not broken.

Here, there is a man with close shorn hair sitting in one of the chairs and holding a mug of tea. He is sitting complacent and docile, his eyes a blank and unfocused gaze.

It is Bruce, but Bruce in a way I have never seen him.

“That’s the real him,” the boy who is me but also not me says, nodding. If the empty Bruce hears him, he gives no indication. “He’s been that way for a long time.”

“What do you–”

“He dreams you. And the others. Not all of them, of course, there’s almost always a bit of truth in dreams. Think about it for a minute. You’re smart. Doesn’t it all seem, well, too convenient?”

I spit to clear the sage from my mouth.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

I don’t know who I am. Am I a ghost? Is this boy who looks like me a ghost?

“Dick was real, of course. Is, sorry. So was Jason. Was, that one stays. But Tim, that man broke the year that Jason died. Alfred Pennyworth had him admitted for his own protection. They hid Batman-- it was hard at first, but the more Bruce slipped the easier it was to just chalk it up to his own paranoia and unhinged stories. And he couldn’t cope with a world where he was responsible for Jason, so in his head, he fixed it. He started with you-- you should be flattered. You were the first distraction: you acknowledging his pain at losing Jason, your parents alive but absent so he could parent you without a legal obligation; the starting point for the others.

“You’ve really never wondered, before?” he asks. “At how neatly it fit together? That you were at the circus the same night, fascinated by both Batman and Dick Grayson before you made the connection? That you, a child, made the connection at all when intelligent adults around you couldn’t?”

“Men see what they want to see,” I say to him coldly, determined that whatever mindgame he is playing won't frighten me.

He laughs, a sharp and brittle sound.

“C’mon, Tim. You aren’t stupid. Occam’s Razor. What makes more sense? That all of it really happened or that somebody made it up? Four dead Robins and none of them still dead? No. No, you were the first of a long line of trying to atone for Jason in his broken little brain.”

I scowl at the dying grass under my polished loafers and then look up across the field to the Arkham garden scene. In all the time we’ve been standing here, he hasn’t raised the mug to drink the contents, even once. A butterfly alights on the table and he doesn’t react to it. I am thinking of the time we spent training, when everything was something to notice. There were entire sessions just pushing me to make sure I didn’t miss details in my surroundings.

With a hunch of my own shoulders, I swallow to try to rid my throat of sage.

“Why?” I ask, considering. There’s no point in ruling out possibilities without honestly considering them, combing each option over for details. And now I want to know, if it’s all fiction, why so many graves? This seems to be the strongest argument against a dreamscape.

“Because he doesn’t think he has anyone. And we’re safer, easier to control and manipulate,” the ghost of me says.

“But why kill them all?” I persist, frowning at where the row of tombstones stood before vanishing.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “You’ve been in his head all this time. Why don’t you tell me? I think it’s because he doesn’t know how to sustain happiness. The only kinds of dreams he can keep up with are the ones that are nightmares. He’s put a little of himself in each of you, surrounded himself with a grand fantasy where none of you stay dead, except the ones that pull you away from his orbit-- your father, your friend. Those relationships are messy and take too much effort to keep track of, but he feeds on the drama within his own circle. And if he could let it go, they’d probably release him.”

My heart that is too hollow, too light, stills within me. I feel the absence of its beating but it doesn’t seem to have any other effect.

“What…” I study Bruce in the chair. He finally sips the tea and it occurs to me that I am certain it is tea and I had no way of knowing this. I clear my throat. “Is he alone? Really?”

“Alfred visits daily. Clark comes once a week. Dick and Barbara are married and stop by when they can. I think he’s noticed, finally. He’s making an effort. That’s why you’re here.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I ask, dread settling over me like lake water, dense and frigid and airless. It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true, but it sort of made sense.

“Do?” he laughs again, that sardonic icy bark of a laugh. “Nothing. His therapist told suggested trying to kill you all off, and well, you were…the first. The first fiction. You’re here to be retired. But it’s sort of a process, for old dreams. You have to be let go. And he’s not sure he wants to, yet.”

“What will happen if he does?”

The sage is now in my mouth, my throat, my nostrils, making my eyes water. My palms are slick, I am sweating all over. I cough.

With every second that passes, I am becoming more certain he speaks the truth. My grip on anything that could contradict him feels tenuous and desperate, a panicked internal railing against the surety of where I stood.

“You end,” he says simply, the bitter mirth gone. “Dreams are just dreams, Tim. They don’t have an afterlife.”

“And if he doesn’t?” I ask, clenching my teeth after to keep them from chattering.

“Business as usual,” he shrugs. “You go back. You might remember, you might not. I don’t know because he’s never gotten you this far before. It’ll probably be big; whenever he tries and fails to stop living in his head, the regression is always dramatic for all of you. Near death, severe injury, something of the sort. Do the others remember?”

“Who?” I ask, frowning. “What do you–”

“Well, he’s never killed _you_ off before. But the others, the ones he brought back. They’ve each been here, but I think that was intentional, you know. It wasn’t therapy, it was just plot.”

“They’ve never said anything,” I say faintly, my head reeling: Jason, Stephanie, Damian. They would have all…

“Then you probably won’t remember either,” he says cheerfully, clapping my shoulder. “That’s a bit of good news, anyway. Don’t you think knowing would really mess you up?”

Across the field, there is the sharp, glittering sound of porcelain splintering into a thousand pieces. We both jerk our heads up in unison to look-- the shell of Bruce Wayne has thrown the tea mug onto the concrete and he is rocking back and forth, muttering and whimpering.

I look at the ghost of me, the ghost who isn’t a ghost. He’s fading and so is the landscape around us.

“Oh, I think he’s changed his mind, again,” the other me says. He smiles one more time, and it is Cheshire in its lingering white malice.

“Sweet dreams!” he calls, the words far away and echoing across the darkness engulfing me.

My throat is full of sage and it is swollen, stinging.

I wake in the Batcave with bruises on my arms from being restrained, while Bruce stands nearby, in the suit with his cowl pushed off his face. He notices I am awake and he looks relieved and exhausted.

“Hey, Tim,” he says wearily, “you had us worried there for a bit. We haven’t had anyone react that way to fear toxin before. I’ll get Alfred.”

“Bruce,” I say, wanting to ask. I want reassurance. I want someone to tell me that it’s ridiculous, but it turns out it is too ridiculous even to ask, to voice, and my questions die on my tongue with the taste of sage.

“Hm?” he says, absently patting my shoulder as he pushes the intercom that is link to the manor. “Alfred, Tim’s awake.”

“I will be right down, sir,” comes the prompt reply.

“How are you feeling?” Bruce asks, sitting in a chair next to the bed.

I swallow.

“Okay,” I lie.

I’m crazy. It was just fear toxin. I know this.

But it’s so dramatic, it’s so neatly arranged, it’s so formulaic. Alfred will come downstairs, he will offer tea and chicken soup. Dick will call. I will sit up and some people I love will stay dead and others I love will never die.

“Tea and soup, Master Timothy,” Alfred says, stepping off the elevator with a silver tray.

And though the fear toxin is, or should be, out of my system, my heart begins to pound and I am drenched in sweat in an instant and the edges of my vision darken.

“Tim?” I hear Bruce say, slightly alarmed.

I begin to cry and I don’t care.

I am not a ghost.

_I am a dream._


	2. Chapter 2

The kitchen is quiet while Alfred Pennyworth sits at the table, thin fingers curled around a cup of steaming tea. He is waiting with an old and practiced patience, a crafted and unhurried ambush. There are no distractions, no lists to write or chores to busy himself with because he is focused.

He set his trap twenty minutes previous, announcing loudly to Bruce that he would walk out with him to the garage because he had errands to run in the city. He walked as far as the door, quietly claimed he had changed his mind, and retreated silently to the kitchen to wait.

There is coffee in the kitchen that, even if he is avoiding food, Tim will come searching for if he thinks Alfred is gone. And he needs to think Alfred is gone because he has been avoiding everyone in the four days since the fear toxin and his subsequent breakdown in the cave, but he has especially been avoiding Bruce and Alfred.

Alfred knows, because it is the sort of thing he feels he ought to know whenever possible, that Tim has also been avoiding sleep and is likely exhausted enough that he will fail to notice such a simple ruse.

When Tim staggers into the kitchen several minutes later, Alfred is justified in his assumptions.

“Master Timothy,” Alfred says clearly while Tim is reaching for the bag of coffee beans in the cabinet with the French press.

The boy’s whole body jerks once in surprise.

“Augh!” Tim shouts, spinning and smacking his face against the open cupboard door.

“Goodness gracious,” Alfred says mildly, standing as Tim rubs his brow with a scowl. “Come sit. I’ll make the coffee.”

Tim opens his mouth to protest but his shoulders spasm and his lips press tightly together. He hunches forward a little and then nods and takes a seat at the table.

Without discussing the decision, Alfred measures decaf grounds into the glass carafe. He does not frown in Tim’s direction because he knows, because it is a nuance he knows from experience, that where Bruce would ignore or deflect a frown from him, Tim would take it as a deeply personal criticism. But he frowns at the kettle as it warms water for the French press.

He is not a stranger to the signs of physical exhaustion, and involuntary muscle tremors along with confusion and lowered reflexes are both serious signs indeed.

When he carries a mug of coffee over to the table, Tim is sitting in a chair with his head lying on his crossed arms on the tabletop, but his eyes are open and staring off aimlessly into the middle distance. Tim flinches when Alfred sets the coffee down.

“Now, Master Timothy,” Alfred says, sitting across from him. “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”

“Nothing,” Tim says, swallowing hard. He hasn’t lifted his head. “I just haven’t been sleeping. That’s all.”

“Master Timothy,” Alfred says again, a bit sternly. “This is more than ordinary insomnia.”

“Fear toxin,” Tim mutters after a long, long silence. “I’m…it’s just taking me longer…don’t tell Bruce.”

“Do you believe yourself to require another dose of the antidote?” Alfred asks, mentally reviewing how much they’d given the boy. It should have been more than enough. “You ought to have mentioned it sooner if–”

“No,” Tim says, waving a limp hand. “It’s out of my system.”

He doesn’t elaborate and Alfred sits quietly while Tim props himself up enough to drink the coffee.

Alfred knows, because it is a thing that is his burden to know, that the effects of fear toxin linger for long after the chemical component has been neutralized. He knows from personal experience and from walking the halls in the darkness before dawn, listening to Bruce and then Dick, and then Jason, and then Tim, and then Cass, and then Damian, as each in their turn shattered the silence with groans or screams or sleepless pacing in the aftermath of encounters with the vile stuff. But they are all experts now at coping with nightmares, they each have the routines they use to clear their minds or escape the flickers of haunting memory.

Except this time, with Tim.

As far as Alfred has been able to gather, Tim has not resorted to any of his usual methods. This is concerning because Tim is not a boy easily rattled-- whatever fear it is that has gripped his heart or mind must run deep and convincing, is almost certainly more than the representation of a phobia.

“You ought to sleep,” Alfred chides gently when the coffee is nearly gone. Even if he doubts Tim will take the advice without argument or resistance, it is the sort of thing he should say to prod Tim along in discussion.

Tim tips the remnants of the coffee, swirling the last mouthful in the mug while he watches it as if mesmerized. He does not appear to have heard Alfred but Alfred also knows that, out of all of the children he has cared for under the manor roof, it is Tim who best mimics Bruce’s ability to ignore or fake inattention.

Alfred waits.

“Do you think Bruce would have been okay without me? Like, eventually?” Tim asks, pushing the unfinished coffee away.

Alfred sighs and crosses his legs, leans back in the kitchen chair. Tim is not the easiest boy to reason with or convince once a seed has been planted in his mind and taken root. If he is not careful, if he does not move and speak with great intention and consideration, his words will be dismissed and he will be cut off from further usefulness. Alfred knows this, because this is not the first such conversation he has had with Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne. The topics vary, but when Tim is in a state like the one he is in now-- physically and mentally and emotionally exhausted, trembling from muscle stress and severing himself from his usual contacts-- he requires both caution and honesty from Alfred.

It is, without elaboration, a difficult balance.

“I think, in time, he would have come to terms with his grief without you, yes,” Alfred acknowledges. “But I do not know that he would have done so without someone else. It is impossible now to say who else could have filled that role, and if they would have come in time to prevent premature death or the crossing of an irreversible transition.”

“So, I saved him?” Tim asks, and rather than a note of hope in his voice there is a dread in the sudden hunch of his thin frame. His words are flat and Alfred’s brow creases in minor, but brief, confusion before he grasps an inkling of what might be haunting Tim.

“No,” Alfred says and the boy slumps forward, just slightly, in evident relief. “You saved him in a way, and have saved him many times since. He is the man he is today partly because you noticed and sought him out. But you perhaps shaped him more than saved him. He was growing violent and I certainly had my concerns, but he was not self-destructive to the point of actual danger. No, Master Timothy, I am afraid that if I am being truthful, I must tell you that you were a stepping stone to his healing and not a savior.”

“Okay,” Tim says, exhaling slowly. “Okay.”

There is little to no point in Alfred asking Tim precisely what he saw or what it is he is recalling at his most haunted moments. Even if the boy would attempt to tell him, the nature of toxin fears was such that they often seemed ridiculous when recounted aloud-- rather than this being reassuring, it had the perverse effect of deepening a sense of isolation.

Tim is fiddling now with the coffee mug, twisting it on the table so the handle makes the loop away from one hand and back to the other.

For a brief second, his eyes flick up to meet Alfred’s own, and the older man’s heart hurts at the desperation and weariness there-- it is too great, too aged, for such a boy to bear. It makes him think of men he knew in the military, men who were men because of their combat and not because of their years.

Eighteen and a veteran.

Nineteen and stooped with the world’s darkest horrors.

Twenty and never with the hope of being young again.

And Tim is only seventeen.

“If,” Tim says, dropping his gaze back to the table. There is a quiet hollowness in the manor, giving it a dreamlike quality of perceived stasis while seconds and then minutes tick by. Tim clears his throat and rather than his voice increasing in volume, it lowers when he continues. Alfred thinks of fairy tales where the furniture or the walls of a powerful house overhear, spy on the inhabitants, tattle about their fears and conspiracies and plans.

“If,” Tim says again in a whisper, “If Bruce had been a danger to himself, to others more than you could accept, would you have admitted him against his wishes to psychiatric care?”

For a moment, the only response Alfred can manage is to blink. He is genuinely shaken by the question, not because he doesn’t know his answer but because he is not certain that they are still actually talking about Bruce.

“Do you believe yourself to be a danger?” Alfred asks directly, unwilling to let this particular point sit in ambiguity.

Tim shakes his head as if bothered by an insect, quick and irritated.

“No. I’m asking about Bruce,” he says. There’s a note of warning in his tone, a sign that the conversation will only continue as long as they stay on topic. That is enough for Alfred to be convinced that he means what he says.

“Yes,” Alfred says without bothering to whisper to match Tim’s low tone. “I would have admitted him and I would yet, if the situation grew dire enough. I do not think I need to remind you that I have served him for years of costumed vigilantism,” Alfred remarks, raising an eyebrow.

Tim nods.

“Nonetheless,” Alfred continues, “if the circumstances were severe enough that I felt him to be beyond his own mental capacity for rational, of a sort, decisions-- if I believed that he was putting himself in needless rather than sacrificial danger, or risked great harm to others for the same reason, I would do everything in my power to stop it. You know I have left before over disagreements, but I am speaking of things more deeply troubling than those. I have a place and the name of a doctor who would aid me.”

In the murky suspension of the manor’s atmosphere, there is a brief moment where it appears as if this news had no effect whatsoever on Tim, but then he does react and Alfred realizes it was fatigue or processing that delayed the response.

Tim puts his head in his hands and exhales, a long and shuddering breath to match the tremor of his back.

“I thought…I was afraid I was a dream,” Tim says into the silence of the kitchen and the patience of Alfred’s company. “I had a dream, or vision, or…you know, I don’t even know what to call it. But Bruce was in Arkham, after Jason. And everything after had been his coping mechanism. Starting with me.”

Alfred knows, because shock is not something that often catches him these days, that perhaps even a small gasp is not the best response to Tim when he is opening up. But it is hard to catch it, to stop himself, when he knows Tim so well.

“But I don’t think he’d let you say that,” Tim rubs at his eyes and yawns, then looks at Alfred. It is the steadiest and most confident he has looked since appearing in the kitchen and as usual, it means that Tim has resolved things inside for himself-- or he wouldn’t be talking about it. It is not that the boy never needs help, it is that he is vague about the ways in which he needs it. Explanations come after, when he is certain of what he says.

“Let me say I’d admit him, against his will?” Alfred asks, to clarify.

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Why would he? If you were made up, why not have you swear to never do it? He didn’t seem very happy. I don’t think he would have. Maybe it’s not that concrete, really, but it’s something, right?”

Alfred knows, because once he was young and stood on the shore of a rocky and frigid ocean, what it is like to have a wave crash over one unexpectedly. And this is that it feels like, to be blown over by Tim’s fear in the same minute that it is already receding-- he barely has time to suck in air against the cold terror of the shock before it is already sucking against the sand and falling back to the choppy sea.

“It is something,” Alfred says.

Tim stands up and stretches; Alfred also rises to his feet. At the head of the kitchen table, he opens his arms, and the weary boy sags against him into a hug so tight Alfred can feel the thudding of his heart, the tension of his tired limbs.

“Thanks, Alfred,” Tim says. “For talking.”

“My dear boy,” Alfred says, his cheek against dark hair, “any time at all. Now go sleep before I have to resort to medicating you.”

“Didn’t you already?” Tim asks, looking suspiciously at the coffee mug as he steps back. “It tasted off.”

“It was decaf,” Alfred says with a slight smile.

“I would have preferred to be drugged, I think,” Tim says scornfully of the mug, with a wry and tired lift of one side of his mouth.

“I thought it was close enough, given the circumstances,” Alfred says, taking the mug up from the table to wash it.

Tim laughs and Alfred thinks again of fairy tales, so clearly does the stress and burden fall away from Tim’s shoulders and frame as he stands and sighs in a relieved, grateful manner.

“Alfred?” he says as Alfred stands at the sink.

“Master Timothy?”

“I’m…is it bad to be a little disappointed, that I’m not a dream?” Tim says and Alfred can hear the frown in his voice. So, not all the burden is gone, apparently.

Alfred knows, because he knows this family and himself, that they are not a family that walks without their burdens in one way or another.

“I mean, if I was a dream, there are a lot of people who didn’t really die.”

“There are a lot of people who didn’t really live, then,” Alfred says, and he gets the distinct impression that Tim has moved beyond actual fear and is purely toying with the theoretical now. He will indulge him if it means the boy will go sleep soon. “I think their lives are worth it, even with loss, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Tim says quietly. “I think it’s all worth it. I don’t know why, but I do.”

“Because it is,” Alfred says with conviction, turning from the running water to look the boy in the face. Tim’s eyes are searching, curious. “It was worth it to know you, Master Timothy. And the others. I would not be here if it were not worth it.”

“I know,” Tim nods, yawning once more. Tim pushes his hair back from his forehead and stops on the threshold between kitchen and hallway. The smile he gives Alfred after is full of confidence and spirit, the same qualities that drove him to the batcave all those years ago. Alfred does not see it often anymore but it is still there, deep inside Tim, always-- Alfred knows this, because he knows Tim.

Tim speaks one more time before going upstairs. The words linger in Alfred’s mind for long after the boy has gone to sleep:

“That’s why I’m here, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all for this story. :) Thank you so much for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a one-shot and is turning into more than that. Expect an update at some point. I just really love Tim Drake and I've been mulling over this idea for a while.


End file.
